Neuroscience

Evaluation Summary:

This manuscript will be of interest to stem cell and developmental biologists who aim to use newly emerging brain organoid models to understand the structure and function of the developing human brain. It presents a technological advance in imaging and describes an innovative method for labeling and tracking of cells within organoids to enable the assessment of dynamic processes within the intact organoid. The method is validated in a disease model and addresses a challenge in the field of human stem cell modeling of assessing cells within the 3D structure.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 and Reviewer #2 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This study combines behavioral data from guinea pigs and data from a classifier model to ask what auditory features are important for classifying vocalisations. This study is likely to be of interest to both computational and experimental neuroscientists, in particular auditory neurophysiologists and cognitive and comparative neuroscientists. A strength of this work is that a model trained on natural calls was able to predict some aspects of responses to temporally and spectrally altered cues. However, additional data, analysis, or modelling would be required to support some of the stronger claims.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 and Reviewer #3 agreed to share their names with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This manuscript puts forward a new toolkit of viruses for manipulation and visualization of zebrafish neural circuits. The authors overcome several challenges in the field and present a set of resources likely to be of high value to the zebrafish community.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #3 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This paper is of interest to neuroscientists studying the interaction between working memory, decision making, cell types, and neural oscillations. It introduces a detailed model of different brain areas which interact giving rise to the complex pattern of oscillations that are observed during a visual attention task. Additionally, the model reproduces the phase-dependent behavioral performance observed experimentally during such a task. This provides a new level of precision in our understanding of how rhythmic attention works in the brain.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. The reviewers remained anonymous to the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This paper is of interest to scientists interested in the functions of the hippocampus, as well as those in the field of sensorimotor timing. The reported data and findings point towards the possibility that the hippocampus supports specific and generalized learning of short time intervals relevant to behavior. While the conclusions are mostly supported by the evidence, further clarification of methodology as well as additional analyses and discussion would strengthen the authors' conclusions.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. The reviewers remained anonymous to the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

Second order conditioning is a higher form of learning where a previously conditioned stimulus (e.g. odor A by food) is used to condition the perception of another stimulus (e.g. odor B by odor A). Yamada et al. have used the fly to identify a neural circuit in the insect mushroom body underpinning second order conditioning. This work elegantly combines neural circuit mapping, electrophysiology and modeling to put forward a mechanistic model for this highly conserved form of learning.

This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. The reviewers remained anonymous to the authors.

Evaluation Summary:

The authors measured the heartbeat and touch perception while people touched a variety of surfaces. The results indicate that people's heart rates and heartbeats vary systematically according to the type of touch performed and how difficult it was to perceive the grooved surfaces. The paradigm and the results appear very interesting though the specific analyses of choice and their presentation require some improvement to make a more convincing case.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 and Reviewer #2 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This manuscript contributes to a circuit-based understanding of how sweet and bitter tastes are integrated with hunger state to drive feeding initiation in Drosophila. Anatomical, behavioral, and neuronal activity data support a multi-step pathway from sensory input to motor output. This manuscript, thus, contributes to our understanding of how multiple sensory cues are integrated with an internal state to reach a behavioral decision.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

In this paper, Ekman and colleagues present novel evidence, using a visual sequence task in fMRI, that the early visual cortex (V1) and the hippocampus both represent perceptual sequences in the form of a predictive "successor" representation, where the current state is represented in terms of its future (successor) states in a temporally discounted fashion. In both brain structures, there was evidence for upcoming, but not preceding steps in the sequence, and these results were found only in the temporal but not spatial domain. This study suggests that the hippocampus and V1 represent temporally structured information in a predictive, future-oriented manner.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #3 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

Haggerty et al. reported findings examining how changes in brain function are involved in alcohol binge drinking, with a selective focus on the synaptic and circuit alterations that occur in the anterior insular cortex inputs within the dorsolateral striatum. They show that chronic alcohol drinking produces glutamatergic synaptic adaptations and by stimulating this circuit, binge drinking could be reduced without altering either water consumption or general performance for select reinforcing, anxiogenic or locomotor behaviors. The results of this study may specifically improve our understanding of the neurocircuitry mediating a common alcohol use disorder associated behavior referred to as "front-loading" or excessive drinking during the very beginning of the session.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #2 agreed to share their name with the authors.)